Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Watch on YouTube. Catch up on old episodes!

Adjunct professor of psychiatry Arthur Lazarus discusses his article, “How inspiration and family stories shape our most meaningful moments,” which presents a moving fictional story excerpted from his book. The narrative centers on Thad, a retired physician and aspiring writer, and his two daughters, one of whom is a new doctor herself. Arthur uses their dinner-table debate over creative license versus factual accuracy in Thad’s writing to explore the nature of inspiration. The conversation delves into how we find authenticity in storytelling, with the father comparing his creative spark to Bruce Springsteen playing an unplanned song at a concert—arguing that fiction can reveal truths that reality obscures. The theme deepens as the family shares the powerful stories behind their names, revealing how a movie or a concert memory can create a legacy of meaning. Ultimately, the story culminates in the birth of a new baby, whose name connects a moment of shared joy between father and daughter, illustrating how inspiration is a spark that gets passed between generations, defining our most cherished connections.

Careers by KevinMD is your gateway to health care success. We connect you with real-time, exclusive resources like job boards, news updates, and salary insights, all tailored for health care professionals. With expertise in uniting top talent and leading employers across the nation’s largest health care hiring network, we’re your partner in shaping health care’s future. Fulfill your health care journey at KevinMD.com/careers.

VISIT SPONSOR → https://kevinmd.com/careers

Discovering disability insurance? Pattern understands your concerns. Over 20,000 doctors trust us for straightforward, affordable coverage. We handle everything from quotes to paperwork. Say goodbye to insurance stress – visit Pattern today at KevinMD.com/pattern.

VISIT SPONSOR → https://kevinmd.com/pattern

SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCAST → https://www.kevinmd.com/podcast

RECOMMENDED BY KEVINMD → https://www.kevinmd.com/recommended

Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show. Subscribe at KevinMD.com/podcast. Today we welcome back Arthur Lazarus. He’s a psychiatrist and author. Today’s KevinMD article is “How inspiration and family stories shape our most meaningful moments.” Arthur, welcome back to the show.

Arthur Lazarus: Hey, Kevin, thanks for having me back. I appreciate your reaching out to me and discussing this. We’ll call it an article, but it’s actually a short, fictional story.

Kevin Pho: All right. So tell us what led you to write the story and share it on KevinMD.

Arthur Lazarus: OK. So, I think the best place to start, if you don’t mind, is I dialed up a few quotes that have resonated with me over the last six months or so. So, one of them is from Albert Camus. He says, “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.” An even better one, and I’m not going to pronounce the individual’s name. I haven’t read any of his works, but I’ve seen his name floated around in literature. Well, I’ll try to pronounce it: Ma Ji Kami (K-A-Z-M-I). “The lies that people tell in stories is what makes them so true.” And then finally, someone that I actually quoted in the article that we’re discussing today, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and I quoted him in that article: “Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.”

So, as you know, for the last several years, actually, since COVID, I’ve taken an intense interest in writing as a therapeutic tool and a modality. Prior to that, I did a lot of academic-type publishing, and we can talk at another podcast about making that transition from academic and scientific writing into fiction writing or creative non-fiction writing. That’s not really the focus, but I just found that writing fiction really was quite liberating in a sense that it allowed me, just as these various individuals have said, to really speak to the truth more than you can sometimes by writing a straightforward op-ed or essay, which you’ve published many of mine, and I appreciate that. And that’s how I began my writing since COVID, really focusing more on what’s happening in the world of medicine and around us. So, up until recently, all of those have been either straightforward, as I said, op-eds, factual-based, or maybe taking the liberty of creative non-fiction, which is writing in a more informal way, creatively, but still focusing on non-fiction, not on fiction.

Honestly, I don’t know how I stumbled into fiction. I mean, I’ve read a lot. I think it was through my long interest in science fiction. And, I wanted to write a story. And this is one of the stories, this article that we’re discussing today, that I wrote earlier, probably about four or five months ago. And it happened at a family event. Now, the story or the article is actually fictional, but it’s close to being autobiographical and close to being a memoir. And that’s one of the things I like about writing fiction is that I can introduce myself in various ways, parts of myself, without having to be totally honest. And I’m not trying to be deceptive here. I’m just trying to be creative in the sense of creating various characters that sometimes may have shades of me or my career in them. And most of my stories, though, are not like that. They’re just completely based on fictional characters, but they’re really a composite of real events and real people.

In terms of being inspired, I mean, quite frankly, one of the ways I’m inspired is by reading your blog every single day. And particularly the essays that are written by physicians and non-physicians. They’re very personal and very personally revealing, and you can see certain themes emerging on your blog and other blogs that I’ve incorporated, a composite of that, into short fictional stories. So I have two books out of short fiction stories. Both have the same title, Real Medicine, Unreal Stories: Lessons and Insights from Clinical Practice, and Volume One and Volume Two are already published, and the article about the inspiration during a family gathering comes from Volume Two. But before we get into that, I just wanted to make one point that, you know, as an author’s note to the introduction to both of those books, I basically say that these books were inspired by real people and events. However, the stories, characters, and outcomes have been significantly altered or combined and should therefore be considered fictional. So, again, that’s just a lead-in here.

Sure. So the event that happened about five months ago was a family gathering with two of my four children at one of my children’s homes. And my kids are scattered. We live in Asheville, North Carolina, and my kids are scattered mostly on the East Coast, but as far west as Honolulu; I have a son who lives in Hawaii. So, it’s great when we can all get together. So, it was a very moving experience I had with two of my children, both daughters. And one of them was very pregnant at the time. And the other one, who in the story, the part that is true, is a family medicine physician. And I send her—I send my kids everything I write. I don’t know if they read it, but I send them everything. Sure. And the family medicine doc is very evidence-based in her orientation and practice. And so one of the things she—she’s read my stories and I think she enjoys them, but she says, “How could you write this? It’s really not true. How could you even put yourself in the position of representing fictional characters, especially, you know, ethnic minorities, for example?” You know, “I’m a privileged white dude,” she might say, “and how can I relate to other people?” And I say, quite frankly, through fiction. And really through treating patients from all walks of life in my career and reading their stories, not only on your blog, but LinkedIn is another place where I turn to for inspiration and writing.

And that’s really the thrust of the message for today that’s in the story: that you know, read widely, and through your patient experiences and encounters and through your reading, you can develop all sorts of opportunities for writing. And I don’t care whether we’re talking about fiction or non-fiction and other genres; poetry, especially. Writing has been shown to be very therapeutic, and you have all sources of inspiration around you to draw from, from practice to reading blogs.

And so this story, very briefly, was about that family gathering, and the touching part comes at the end where the fictional part—partly fictional—was my younger daughter who was eight months pregnant at the time. Several years ago, we went to a Paul Simon concert. And we were rewarded and hoping that he would do a song that we both love called “Father and Daughter.” It was actually in the soundtrack of The Wild Thornberrys Movie, which was out years ago. And he did, he did play that song. But in the story, it’s not “Father and Daughter.” It’s actually Little Richard’s song, “Lucille.” Now that’s the fictional part. And I researched this quite a bit about Paul Simon and his setlist for various concerts. As far as I can tell, he never did that song ever in concert or recorded it. But why did I choose “Lucille” as a song that we would have heard at a Paul Simon concert? Simply because she named her daughter Lucy. And that’s the true part. So I weave in and out of fact and fiction. I fill in with backstories that have plausibility but aren’t necessarily true and are a composite of different people, different times, and so forth.

And within the story, there was another thing that I wanted to point out that I’ve already mentioned. I often will weave in, as you know, lyrics from rock songs. I grew up with rock and roll, you know, the British invasion. And I see the lyrics in rock songs as just another form of writing, and poetry and fiction and so forth. And so, having been immersed in that culture, when I’m writing a story, I don’t necessarily intend to incorporate any lyrics or reference to music, but something will come up in the writing that will just naturally lead me into incorporating some lyrics from some songs. And I don’t do that with every story. It’s the minority of stories, but in this case, it was Paul Simon.

And also there was one other one, one of my favorite recording artists who hasn’t been too active recently, is Steve Winwood, who formed a group earlier in his career. He gained notoriety and fame as a 16-year-old organist with the Spencer Davis Group, then went on to form his own group, Traffic. And one song in particular that I mentioned in this article was called “Sometimes I Feel So Uninspired.” And to be quite frank, and I mentioned this in the article, it came from an album called Shootout at the Fantasy Factory. And it was panned by critics. It was not one of Traffic’s better efforts or Steve Winwood’s better efforts, and he probably was uninspired at the time. He may have been going through writer’s block for all I know. But yes, I’m not going to repeat the whole story, but those are the major things about putting myself in the place of other characters and my daughter calling me out for that; about weaving in other sources of information, whether it’s rock songs or poetry or other works of fiction or non-fiction into stories. It just, writing fiction opens up a whole new world where I can take liberty that I normally wouldn’t take with writing factual essays or op-eds. So.

Kevin Pho: When readers read your fiction, oftentimes, as you said, there are messages. So what do you hope your readers come away with after reading your fiction?

Arthur Lazarus: The same thing that they come away with if I were to write very formally for a factual-based essay, which is that medicine is broken. I mean, there are several themes, but those are the central themes. In my stories, medicine is broken, perhaps beyond repair. I’m not really trying to advertise a book, but another one that was recently published is called Critical Condition: American Medicine at the Quarter Century Mark. So 2025, quarter-century mark, and I think medicine is in critical condition. That’s clearly a theme that comes out.

Another thing that comes out is the clinical realm: for example, doctors dismissing patients’ complaints, particularly from a woman with vague symptoms, and gaslighting an ethnic minority’s perspective or point of view, and how other patients and physicians may relate in a negative way to ethnic minorities. I’m just rattling through some themes that come out that are very important today. Burnout, obviously. I’m a little burned out about writing about burnout, quite frankly. And I don’t mean to be callous about that, but I’ve written a lot about burned-out physicians seeking help. Retirement or physicians facing retirement and what to do in the next phase of their life. And I’m one of those physicians, and I’ve taken up writing, for example, or being forced out of a job. The corporate takeover of medicine, which was a recent op-ed that I just published on your blog, about the corporatization of pharmacy chains, for example, and how that’s negatively impacted patient access to medications. So there are so many themes that are going on, and what I’d like my readers to take away from my writing is an awareness of what’s happening today in contemporary medicine.

And the last thing I’ll say, Kevin, is that I write not only for physicians and residents and medical students and even seasoned attendings, but I also keep in mind a lay audience. So I would really like anyone to be able to pick up my books of fiction and relate to them. And you don’t need in-depth medical training because the themes are obvious. And it’s easier for me to make these points by having fictional characters.

Kevin Pho: Has there ever been a time when either your op-eds or your work of fiction have moved the needle for someone in medicine or made a difference? You mentioned you want to highlight some of the problems in our health care system; has there ever been a time where your writing has actually moved that needle?

Arthur Lazarus: Not as a sweeping movement, quite frankly. I have gotten lots of individual responses, not in agreement, and in dissent and dissension too. But that’s equally healthy. It doesn’t matter to me. I have thick skin. But I think that we’re losing the battle, we, being physicians, practitioners. I just don’t see—and I’ll be quite frank with you too—I write from a political perspective too. And I’m not enthralled about the current administration and the sweeping cuts that they’re making in the medical arena and beyond. And I just don’t see us reversing the tide. And me as one person, writing books and not having an agent or a formal marketing outlet, I don’t see it moving the needle. I wish it would, but right now I don’t see that.

Kevin Pho: We are talking to Arthur Lazarus. He’s a psychiatrist and author. Today’s KevinMD article is “How inspiration and family stories shape our most meaningful moments.” Arthur, let’s end with some take-home messages you want to leave with the KevinMD audience.

Arthur Lazarus: Oh, absolutely. First of all, don’t give up the fight. We need to coalesce. Part of our problem is, you know, it’s a divided house with different areas of specialization and, you know, it’s the Abraham Lincoln quote about a house divided, you know, will not stand. So I would like us to focus more on being in unison, fighting the good fight, repelling obvious policies, legislation, whatever it is that is a turnoff to folks entering and staying in medicine today.

The other point that I wanted to make, I think I have made it really, is for practitioners to engage more with their patients’ stories. The problem is that we’re in an assembly line, you know, in a 15-minute assembly line, and we’re sitting behind a computer. Now, I know with ambient AI scribes, maybe that will change to some degree, but the point is we’re just ticking off boxes, and I would like to leave the message that we need to engage more in stories. We’ve been telling stories since the era of the cavemen, if not communicating verbally, at least sharing in visual representation. We’ve been sharing stories.

Physicians are great storytellers. I’m not going to rattle off the list of great physician writers, but it’s lengthy, and we’re primed to be storytellers. Even though we’re taught in a scientific way, we’re still taught to tell a story. You know, we do an H&P, we talk to patients, we gather all the important information, and then as medical students, we’re trained to distill that into a story to tell to our senior resident or the attending, whoever. So we are primed to be storytellers.

I would say engage more in storytelling with patients. Reveal what you feel comfortable with personally, especially if it’s an experience that a patient can relate to because they’re going through it right now.

And the last thing is to take it a step further in terms of writing stories, or poetry, and the many different genres of writing. It’s not only therapeutic, but it’s a way to get the message out there. Whether it moves the needle or not is not the primary purpose. The primary purpose is really to share and let other folks know that we’re all human and we’re all going through similar experiences.

Kevin Pho: Arthur, thank you so much for sharing your perspective and insight. Thanks again for coming back on the show.

Arthur Lazarus: My pleasure. Thank you, Kevin.